Jean-Luc Godard: 'Beyond the Stars' There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray. Why does one remain unmoved by stills from Bitter Victory when one knows that it is the most beautiful of films? Because they express nothing. And for good reason. Whereas a single still of Lillian Gish is sufficient to conjure up Broken Blossoms, or of Charles Chaplin for A King in New York, Rita Hayworth for Lady from Shanghai, even Ingrid Bergman for Elena, a still of Curt Jurgens lost in the Tripolitan desert or of Richard Burton wearing a white burnous bears no relation to Curt Jurgens or Richard Burton on the screen. A gulf yawns between the still and the film itself. A gulf which is a whole world. Which? The world of the modem cinema. It is in this sense that Bitter Victory is an abnormal film. One is no longer interested in objects, but in what lies between the objects and becomes an object in its tum. Nicholas Ray forces us to consider as real something one did not even consider as unreal, something one did not consider at all. Bitter Victory is rather like one of those drawings in which children are asked to find the hunter and which at first seem to be a meaningless mass of lines. Not that one should say 'behind the British Commando raid on Rommel's HQ lies a symbol of our time', because there is no behind and no before. Bitter Victory is what it is. One does not find reality the one hand - the conflict between Lieutenant Keith and Captain Brand - and fiction on the other - the conflict between courage and cowardice, fear and lUcidity, morality and liberty, or what have you. No. It is no longer a question of either reality or fiction, or of one transcending the other. It is a question of something quite different. What? The stars, maybe, and men who like to look at them and dream. Magnificently edited, Bitter Victory is exceptionally well acted by Curt Jurgens and Richard Burton. With Et Dieu ... crea La femme, this makes twice one can believe in a character created by Jurgens. As for Richard Burton, who has acquitted himself well enough in all his previous films, good or bad, when directed by Nicholas Ray he is absolutely sensational. A kind of Wilhelm Meister 1958? No matter. It would mean little enough to say that Bitter Victory is the most Goethian of films. What is the point of redoing Goethe, or of doing anything again - Don Quixote or Bouvard et Pecuchet, J'accuse or Voyage au bout de La nuit - since it has already been done? What is love, fear, contempt, danger, adventure, despair, bitterness, victory? What does it matter compared to the stars? Never before have the characters in a film seemed so close and yet so far away. Faced by the deserted streets of Benghazi or the sand-dunes, we suddenly think for the space of a second of something else - the snackbars on the Champs-Elysees, a girl one liked, everything and anything, lies, the treachery of women, the shallowness of men, playing the slotmachines. For Bitter Victory is not a reflection of life, it is life itself turned into film, seen from behind the mirror where the cinema intercepts it. It is at once the most direct and the most secret of films, the most subtle and the crudest. It is not cinema, it is more than cinema. How can one talk of such a film? What is the point of saying that the meeting between Richard Burton and Ruth Roman while Curt Jurgens watches is edited with fantastic brio? Maybe this was a scene during which we had closed our eyes. For Bitter Victory, like the sun, makes you close your eyes. Truth is blinding.